Monday, August 14, 2006

"Antonia Bance, the Labour councillor for Rose Hill & Iffley, was invited by the Department for Communities and Local Government on a three-day, all expenses-paid conference in Budapest on the finer points of blogging - the keeping of Internet diaries. She received a £500 bursary to go on the trip, which was attended by "several hundred" other bloggers and representatives from central and local government."

Why couldn't they have sent Bob Piper ? And held it in Ulan Bator ? Over an eighteen-year period ?

Only joking, Bob. There's still the odd bit of industry left to get rid of in the Black Country ...

"BUNCE n. British -- money or profit. A word dating from the 19th century and almost obsolete by the 1960s, except among street traders and the London underworld. In the late 1980s the word was revived by middle-class users such as alternative comedians in search of colourful synonyms in a climate of financial excesses. Bunce may originally have been a corruption of 'bonus.'" "The Dictionary of Contemporary Slang" by Tony Thorne (Pantheon Books, New York, 1990)."British English: A to Zed" by Norman W. Schur (Harper Perennial, New York, 1987) says the American equivalent is "windfall." And that bunce is informal, "...Originally, just an profit (derived from bonus?) but latterly an unexpected one. It has now gained some currency as a verb, especially in the gerund, buncing, to describe the practice, in retail stores, of sticking new higher-price tags over the original lower-price labels on articles for sale."